Dreams and Nightmares
by Norwest
Summary: The hardest challenge wasn't getting away, it was living with yourself afterwards. Booker tries to remember his previous life - and wishes he could forget it.


Major spoilers for _Bioshock Infinite._

* * *

He catches the knife without thinking.

He never could have done that before. _(when?)_ Before...it doesn't matter. Point is, he's standing here holding a blade what's still quivering a hairs-breadth from his face, and two ugly Irish sonsabitches are still gawping at him like he's just grown a beard.

"Hello, paddy," he says with that old devil's grin, and the fight's on. The two bruisers were good and had more than the one knife with 'em, but the fight's short and brutal. _(how?)_ He leaves them to hold their heads and stagger home 'stead of giving 'em an Injun haircut, _(why?)_ and looks down at the hands what just did something damn near impossible.

Same old hands, same old scars, same old Booker. Only...how come there ain't no AD? _(what?)_ How come he's got all mellow and soft in his old age? How come his hands're catching knives out of thin air like he's got one of those snake-oil tonics making him move quick, and how come he's so sure he's missing another scar or two?

Things don't add up. It's New York, only it's normal and regular and ain't on fire. There's war brewing off in Europe, but the war wasn't in Europe...was it? It's all quiet and peaceful on the home front: no war here and no Founders or Vox Populi to fight, just the usual downtown dust-ups he gets his paycheck for. He saw old Cornelius Slate organizing the dockworkers a couple shifts back, the Captain's mustache as wide as it was at Wounded Knee (though a little greyer now). Though they fought with knuckleduster and truncheon and fists, it was a good-hearted sort of scuffle. Slate's strikers camped out on the docks another day, Booker's Pinkertons went home to dinner and families, and the hospitals took in nothing worse than a couple broken arms and legs. The "White Injun" bringing every-body home safe - who'd have thought!

It's right, only it ain't.

Anna...well, the girl's settling in pretty well at school. She brings back top-notch marks, her teacher gushing over "such talent for a little girl," though he just chuckles and laughs it off. _(Elizabeth?)_ She doesn't fit in too well with the other kids, can't just relax and chase the toddlers 'round the kindergarten like the others do. Spends her time at the library; any time she misses supper, he always knows he'll find her buried in a book off in one of them old bookstores. She paints sometime - disturbing stuff, though he'd die rather than say it to her face. She'll finish a sketch, all fire and flame and so damn familiar, _**(Columbia!)**_and he'll force a grin on his face and hug her tight though he knows the bottle's coming out again that night.

She's got secrets. Anna's far too smart a girl for her age, for any age really, though that might be a father's pride speaking for him. She'll see the little aches and bruises what comes from him being a Pinkerton boss, the big ones too, and that look of pain she wears is too damn old for any girl only eight years of age. She'll see things and hear things what ain't properly there, though she hides it well - and if he thinks and looks about it too much, perhaps he sees 'em too.

He's got his own secrets. He won't begrudge Anna for carrying a few too.

Sometimes he wonders if he's dead, if all those hopes and hates and fears are just his own devils poking him with their pitchforks and giggling when he screams. Mayhaps he died in the charge at Wounded Knee, or falling from a rail, or mayhaps he was beaten down and torn and drowned in his own sins. _**(Comstock!)**_ Is this Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, Eden? He's got no clue.

He unlocks the front door with a rattle of keys; the first damn thing he's sure he did was to sell that old rathole and get a proper apartment for...for them. The after-work ritual is as practiced as ever: scuff the mud off your boots, leave the .45 and the badge by the door, coat on the rack, and-

It's sobbing. _**(Elizabeth!)**_ He knows the voice. He's upstairs in the blink of an eye, his holdout piece loaded and sighted, but he stops afore he busts the door in. He's done enough damage trying to run after his daughter with a gun, though he couldn't properly say when or why, and something tells him that a bullet won't really solve a problem like this. So for the first time in perhaps as long as he can remember, Booker DeWitt doesn't shoot first.

He eases Anna's door open softly, peeking inside. No lock on the door - she wouldn't stand for it. She's curled up on her bed, already growing taller than that little pine-board thing he hammered together for her five years ago.

God, she's beautiful.

He steps towards her, asking "Anna?" She's up in a moment, hunched away from him, and in her eyes he can see abject, absolute fear. _**(COMSTOCK!)**_He stops, unsure-

_I remember. I remember the lighthouse and Columbia, remember the light and the life and the fall to darkness. I remember Monument Tower and the Songbird, and__**I am Zachary Hale Comstock,**__and-_

God, it's all so damn bad. He was a sinner through and through; he deserved every rock and every stone. Yet Elizabeth? Far as he could tell, her punishment was to be stuck here with _him_.

But in the end, for all the blood and the hate and the death - in the end, it's all just details.

And the details don't change a goddamn thing.

He looks around the room, the pink wallpaper he put in almost a decade ago glaringly bright after the drab brown of the streets. He sees the old guitar in the corner: for the life of him, he can't remember how it came here. Near as he could tell, it just showed up one day in her room and never left since.

Details. _Who, what, when, why_ - just details. In an instinctive way he still can't place, he knows what really matters: Comstock never touched that instrument.

He takes up the guitar without thinking, sits it on his lap with a practiced motion. He's never played a guitar before in his life. Yet she already knows what hymn he'll play, before he finishes the first chord. She sits up, that hate and fear draining away from her like streams into a river, as she sings the first line:

"_Will the circle be unbroken, by and by, by and by?"_

He sings the words, for the first time without bitterness or hate behind them:

"_Is a better home awaiting, in the sky, Lord, in the sky?"_


End file.
